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Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic – even in non-political subreddits::A new study links partisan activity on the Internet to widespread online toxicity, revealing that politically-engaged users exhibit uncivil behavior even in non-political discussions. The findings are based on an analysis of hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million Reddit users.
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Two sides of the same coin, I barely see a difference, you both invoke hate and make the world worse.
Edit: This comment makes it clear the truth hurts. You should look at yourselves for what you really are.
Enlightened centrist horse shit
Ignorant peon exposed.
Clown take of the year, bot, congrats.
Hey look, a moron I get to block! Thank you for showing me your toxicity.
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If you don’t understand one of those positions is objectively bad then that says a whole lot about you.
To be fair, while I agree with the viewpoint here, I don’t think there’s anything that’s objectively good or bad, just morals and beliefs in a society. I hope that’s what the other chap is getting at.
Something we consider to be 100% bad, like physically hitting a misbehaving child, may in fact be seen as acceptable to people from another society elsewhere in the world, or in a different time period.
It’s all just about perspective, good and bad are relative constructs.
I’m still gonna stick to being our societies version of good, fascists and xenophobes etc can go screw, but I’m under no illusion that my beliefs or morals are objectively immutably good.
Just food for thought is all!
Bigotry such as the transphobic rhetoric the OP of this thread was referencing is objectively bad. And I have zero interest in your attempt to defend child abuse.
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Aha! You are bad because of the way you think. The classic.
Yes, dumb too.
This but unironically
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I can understand someone feeling different than how they were born, it’s all fine and dandy.
But another species?
The litter boxes were emergency bathrooms for shooter lockdowns. Some clever villain tied it to “identify as” rhetoric, and politicians ran with new ammo to beat up their current punching bag.
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you don’t have to understand it, you just shouldn’t be a legislative genocidal asshole about it (not that that’s what you’re doing, but that’s what republicans seem to do to anything they think isn’t their slim sliver of a definition of “normal”)
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if you’re talking about furries, to my layman’s understanding of the subculture, that’s not how the vast majority of furries relate to themselves. From what I’ve seen, it’s not that they are the animal itself, they are the aspects of the animal, and those things are just little icons that they’re like boosting because they resonate with it. That said, there are at least a few people who DO feel that way, but I’m pretty sure they have a special category name (ferals? I think that’s what they’re called but I could be wrong, this is some deep lore I picked up years ago). If they do have that special name and I’m not just making that part up, then that implies that most furries do not feel that way about themselves.
But, acknowledging the existence of people like that at all does validate your question in my mind. I don’t really understand that extreme either. My only point is that most furries are what you would likely consider “normal”, they just have a particular hobby. It’s no more nefarious or odd than being into gender bending cosplay. You’re just taking something (yourself rather than an anime/video game character) and twisting it into something artistically different (a fursona instead of a cosplay outfit).
…no I did not intend to write that much defending furries but here we are lmao
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I’d imagine the same is true for Lemmy and politically engaged people (at least online) overall.
I’m not so sure. The study discusses specifically people who engage in partisan subreddits, which is not the same as being politically engaged. It also uses an AI to grade toxicity, which surely mischaracterizes many interactions.
For example, I have been in communities of a non-political nature, where political discussions occur. These are often about real issues that affect real people in the community, and yet there are people complaining about political content.
To complain about political content is, at best, a very privileged take, demonstrating that you are in a position where politics do not affect you much. At worst, it is actively hostile behavior with the goal of continuing the status quo and shutting down discourse. I would call most of these kinds of comments “toxic”, and yet the rhetoric is usually fine, so I doubt an AI would agree.
I’d say if you are politically engaged, the likelihood of you being in a political internet community is fairly high.
To complain about political content is, at best, a very privileged take, demonstrating that you are in a position where politics do not affect you much.
Could just be that they don’t care for politics in that community. Time and place for everything and it seems some feel the time and place for politics is everywhere all the time. It can be tiring. I don’t remember what year it was that pretty much every single place was talking about immigration politics. Important topic for sure but a meme community about funny road signs isn’t the place for heated soapboxing about closing down the border.
Say you don’t like Linux here and tell me how many people call you a bootlicker lol
Or even better - “piracy is theft” or “ads keep YouTube free and are thus good.”
You don’t have to believe it. Just toss it up in a thread as a test and enjoy your next 12-36 hours.
Just saying things “as a test” is indistinguishable from defending it online. Things like body language, tone and intent do not come across as easily.
That being said toxic people exist everywhere on the internet it’s a flaw in our biology, we haven’t adapted to communicating this way yet.
That being said there’s a difference between a bad take like your above examples and condoning oppression and marginalization as some political groups have do.
One deserves to be defended vehemently.
Just saying things “as a test” is indistinguishable from defending it online.
Yes this is why it works as a test.
That being said there’s a difference between a bad take like your above examples
Only one of my statements is an opinion (I like a plug and play OS I don’t need to configure because I spend all my “customize” energy on my PC itself). The others are objective facts that make people sad.
This is what I mean by toxicity, and how I know for a fact the test will work
Testing people like that is not a great if your looking to dissect a viewpoint sounds more like being inflammatory, especially with your word choice.
Opinions can be bad takes. See > your examples.
I express exactly one opinion there, and it isn’t a “take” at all. “I don’t care for Linux” is not an inflammatory statement except to an absolute zealot.
Sorry guess I should have been more clear. All of your examples are opinions as in not demonstrably fact.
I don’t particularly mind any OS one way or the other I’ll use the best tool for the job. What I’m saying is a bad take are your proposed scenarios on piracy and ads which there’s no evidence to support, in fact there’s a lot to the opposite.
This would make what you said an opinion and by my point of view a “bad take”. Does that make you wrong to express them? No and I never said as much.
So I guess I just lost the thread on your point because all of those are just opinions. I was just using a colloquialism. Which brings me back to my point that usually when I see people get heated it’s because people are being bigoted.
Why limit online? Someone got into a shouting match with me because I didn’t agree with what fox news told him. When I realized what he had dragged me into, I walked away.
Because toxicity tends to falter in reality. Not to say there is no toxicity offline, there absolutely is. But you’ll find most of the toxic people have small dog syndrome. They’re all bark until they are face to face with someone. Excluding mob mentality of course.
See also: hexbear, lemmygrad.
AkA Chappo Trap House. I’ve never received so much hate from a community (expept on the_donald maybe). My crime? I think South Park is fun.
True
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Doing my best to change this. I am extremely toxic without engaging in political behavior.
I’m similar, I wouldn’t say I’m very toxic but I’m like stressed and determined in regular conversations. Struggling to just have friendly chats without being a know it all prick
This sounds like the textbook definition of a collider. Meaning that being toxic is the likely “root cause” and that toxic people are more likely to engage in political discourse (because it’s likely going to be toxic anyways? Idk) and they are more likely to comment toxic stuff in general.
Good points, add to that troll farms and bots
Really curious about the tool they used to quantify “toxicity/disruptive” comments. My initial suspicion would be that political commentary, regardless of human-perceived toxicity, might be biased toward “toxic” by an automated sentiment analysis.
In short: I am suspicious that automated tooling exists to reliably distinguish between toxic and non-toxic political discourse.
We also have to deal with the fact that toxicity has become an almost meaningless label. The way we seem to apply it now, feels like we’d say there was a lot of “toxicity” around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, too. Or even the Civil War.
We’ve conflated “angry, hateful, bitter, disruptive, belittling” with “caring enough to get upset”. There’s been study after study trying to blame social media for the rise in “political toxicity”, and every last single one of them seems to want to sweetly ignore the context of the moment in time we’re living in.
People are acting volatile because there are a lot of volatile events happening that directly affect people’s lives. And all these high-minded discussions about how people online are so mean and rude, or how people don’t listen to each other anymore, consistently sidestep that very crucial piece of context.
So I ask, what do we mean by “toxic”? Because I have a strong feeling a good deal of women were being real “toxic” on June 24 2022. Why is the story not about why? And why does that deserve to be grouped in with the same toxicity comes from the people responsible?
I found myself becoming a lot more toxic the past few weeks, but the carpet bombing of Gaza has gotten me exceptionally angry. A lot of Zionist content is deliberately false and provocative. Not an excuse though.
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None of us are unguilty, not one
This just in, the sky is blue and the Pope is Catholic.
toxic people are toxic
I like to tell people who are serious about politics that I boned their mother.
Some people just want to grill
I unfollowed all the political subreddits I used to follow except stupidpol and red scare for exactly this reason.
I think most people have a friend or relative like this. They simply must bring their political views into every single conversation, all of the time. If you try to deflect or even outright tell them you don’t want to discuss politics, they will invariably say something like “but everything is political”. It’s exhausting. Then they wonder why they stop getting invited to things.
Your apathy is part of the problem.
Yes, I am that friend/relative.
Not wanting to discuss politics 24x7 in all contexts and settings is not “apathy”. I vote. I participate. I donate money. I discuss politics at appropriate times and places.
Wanting to dominate all conversations with your political opinion is pathological.
It was meant to be a self depreciating joke, but now I can’t help myself. I think this topic ends up having everybody involved make a bunch of assumptions about each other before it begins.
However, I have experienced people say that they, “don’t want to get political,” right after being confronted for saying something misinformed, hurtful, etc. It can be weaponized as an excuse to avoid self reflection.
I know that isn’t the case for everybody, but I have seen, “don’t make things political,” used as, “don’t bring in politics at odds with my own.” It’s often not even recognized by that person as being hypocritical. Sometimes our own politics can become the default in our mind and everybody else’s view is the “political” one.
Apologies for missing the joke. And I agree that it can be a dodge in some contexts, too. Also agree that the word can be used incorrectly.
People who use “political” incorrectly like that remind me of the old South Park depiction of Michael Jackson, calling everything “ignorant”.
Reminds me of this key and peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3h6es6zh1c
